Hmm, it seems you are experiencing some issues with the device permissions,
unrelated to PA itself.
Could you please check whether ACLs are properly set for the devices in /dev/snd?
Are you running the latest HAL? The utopia versions from rhughes have broken ACL
support.

Is this a 24-bit-only sound card with an ICE chip? The version of PA currently
in Rawhide doesn't support sound cards without 16bit samples. I will upload a
version that is compatible with these soundcards tomorrow.

Assuming that that you soundcard is one of those 24bit-only cards, I will close
this bug now, since the PA upload I made yesterday (0.9.7-0.12.svn20070925)
should work fine with those cards.
If not, feel free to reopen this bug!

Hmm, that pacmd dump you postes shows that XMMS is connected to the non-24bit
card. How does it look like if you connect XMMS to the 24-bit sink? (I mean,
this is where your problam occurs, right, so the dump of the problematic setup
is a lot more valuable to me)

I thought that selecting the card as default in the "Output Devices" tab in the
volume control would choose that card but that doesn't seem the be the case. How
do I select the card? Starting the device chooser results in an avahi error
message and while the device chooser starts up find after starting the avahi
service it doesn't show any devices under "default sink" so I'm not sure how to
choose that card as a default.
By the way using the "Sample Cache" tab in the PA manager and selecting the
right playback device results in proper playback so the playback itself works.

padevchooser only shows network zeroconf devices.
PA remembers the device used for apps and restores them when they connect to PA
the next time. The "default" device you can choose by right clicking on a device
in pavucontrol just sets the default for previously unknown applications.
Please right click on a stream in pavucontrol to move it to another device.

That did the trick and now things run fine, thanks! Allowing to set the output
and volume for each application individually is a nice approach and offers some
interesting new possibilities. :)
I did discover a problem with the implementation though. When I killed
pulseaudio and started it again it didn't remember the output settings for the
applications so I had to manually set all of them to the correct device again.
I think there are several problems here:
1. Pulseaudio should store the settings for the default audio device and the
individual application settings directly when they are changed so that they are
retained even in the case of a system crash.
2. Right now I have to start each application in order to be able to change its
output settings. There should be a way to do this even if the app is not running
so that I don't have to go back and forth between application and pavucontrol in
order to change those settings. Fixing number 1 above should make most of the
pain of this go away but if you are buying a new soundcard you still have to go
through this tedious process.
3. There should be a way to quickly reset the output settings of all
applications to the default output device i.e. when I put a new card in my
machine I should be able to select it as the new default and then tell
Pulseaudio to change all application outputs to the new default. Otherwise you
end up with the same problem mentioned in point 2 above.
4. This is more of an upgrade issue and not really related to the normal
operation of Pulseaudio. When upgrading the system from a non-Pulseaudio based
to a Pulseaudio based version (e.g. FC7->F8) Pulseaudio should pick up the old
system settings as default i.e. in my case I should have selected the 24bit card
as default because that was the default before installing Pulseaudio. This is
probably something that could be done in Anaconda as the yum upgrade path is not
really supported anyway. This wouldn't really have helped in my case but I'm
following rawhide and rawhide eats babies which I recognize but I think it's a
relevant concern for people who upgrade their system from release to release.